Militant held in reporter's murder

May 30, 2003|By From Tribune news services.

MULTAN, Pakistan — An Islamic militant accused of helping to plan the kidnapping and killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was arrested at a bus station in central Pakistan on Thursday, police said.

The suspect, Qari Abdul Hai, who allegedly had close ties with Afghanistan's deposed Taliban, is the chief of a banned militant group condemned by the United States as a terrorist organization, police said. The group has been accused of involvement in bombings at public places in Pakistan.

Hai was captured in Muzaffargarh, 60 miles west of Multan, as he was about to board a bus for Karachi, the southern city where Pearl was kidnapped Jan. 23, 2002, and later found dead, police official Awais Malik said.

Police refused to give more details about Hai's alleged role in Pearl's kidnapping.

Four Islamic militants were convicted last year of involvement in the kidnap-slaying of Pearl.

One of them, British-born Islamic militant Sheik Omar Saeed was sentenced to death, and the three others were given life sentences. All four have filed appeals.

Malik said Hai is head of the banned Sunni Muslim Lashkar-e-Jhangvi militant group, which was designated a terrorist group by Washington this year.

Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is believed to have been involved in the crimes against Pearl and many bus and church bombings in Pakistan.

The group has been implicated in the murder of 17 Christians in October 2001 and dozens of deadly attacks on Pakistan's minority Shiite community in the mid-1990s.

The Sunni Muslim group had close connections with the Taliban, who were ousted from power in Afghanistan by the U.S. military in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Authorities said it also had forged links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda militant network, which is blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Pervez Musharraf outlawed the group in August 2001.

Most of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi's leaders have either been arrested, killed in police confrontations or have gone underground.

Its former chief, Riaz Basra, was killed in May 2002 in a shootout with police in a village in the eastern province of Punjab.

Malik said that there was a $35,000 reward for Hai's arrest and that he had been linked to the murders of many Shiite Muslims around the country in recent years.